In an opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal, Andrew Coulson declares that "America Has Too Many Teachers," and he proposes getting rid of lots of them.
This is just another terrible idea from the "privatize everything" crowd, and it goes something like this: In a time of high unemployment and a stagnant economy, we should fire nearly half of America's teachers, creating almost 3 million more unemployed people and reducing government spending by $210 billion annually*.
Then, the theory goes, the private sector will magically replace all those jobs and more, pumping even more than the $210 billion into the economy that was lost in government spending. And we'll all live happily ever after.
Of course, we've already tried this theory several times in the past decade (Bush tax cuts for the rich, local government austerity and layoffs after stimulus spending ran out, etc), and the result was always the same: massive cuts in government revenue and spending slowed economic growth and worsened unemployment, and the private sector did not step in to fill those gaps. Most of the savings from tax cuts and loopholes were kept by corporations as profits, or paid as dividends and salaries to executives and large shareholders, who don't tend to spend their money in ways that stimulate the economy and create jobs. (Little known fact: Food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, payroll tax holidays, and other social programs that encourage poor and working-class people to spend money on basic necessities are WAY more economically stimulating, and thus WAY more job-creating, than tax cuts that disproportionately target corporations and the wealthy. And targeting essential services like education for the most massive cuts in already lean times is a particularly harsh and silly way to 'cut our way to prosperity').
But The Wall Street Journal opinion page does not live in a fact-based universe.
* (An aside: Coulson suggests that private schools will pick up the slack. Somehow we'll magically come up with the money to send lots of kids there, which in practical terms probably means, despite his framework, not cutting taxes or spending at all, but rather taking the $210 billion from public schools and handing it to private and religious schools in the form of vouchers, which will in all likelihood educate fewer students with those same dollars, and certainly not reach out to help those, like the severely disabled, who are the most costly to educate).